disgusting, overrated, pointless

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

When Joseph Losey gets his hands on the right material he can do wonders with it. This doesn't seem to have been the right material, or maybe Losey was just impatient with Burton's boozing or something.First, don't expect a biopic of Leon Trotsky, the stormy petrel of revolution. The title describes the assassination of Trotsky. He's a professorial sort, exiled to Mexico City after Stalin took over and betrayed Lenin's principles by playing footsies with Wall Street. It often happens with extremist ideologies that they split up, because everyone wants to be purer than the next guy. At that, Trotsky was lucky to get out alive. Stalin had ANYONE who represented a threat to his power murdered. Stalin went about, doing bad.It's an unpleasant movie. We have to sit through a bullfight and learn why movies usually don't show us the final coup, after which the bull drags himself around vomiting blood until he flops down, while the crowd cheers. I know -- the bravery and grace of the matador and all that, but why don't they just let the bull go? Sometimes there is a thin line between beauty and baseness. I understand why the scene was included. The matador does to the bull what Alan Resnais does to Burton, more or less. And instead of dying a neat Hollywood death, Burton staggers up from his chair, a hole in his skull, stares at Resnais and shrieks bloody murder.There are long periods in which we watch Mexicans doing nothing in particular. And the scenes can be confusing. It's not always easy to tell what's going on. The musical score appears to have been made by a thousand chirping electronic crickets. Lots of talent and momentous intentions gone awry.

Avoid. Interminable opening crowd scenes of labour activists arguing as they parade in a clumsy attempt to highlight the passion of the schism. Romy Scheider and Alain Delon are strangely passionless and Richard Burton's Trotsky is on autopilot. Maybe they all just fancied a holiday in Mexico. There's no dramatic tension because there's no sympathy available for the characters on screen; instead the viewer is willing the whole ensemble to get on with it so that they can do something more interesting with their life like stare at fridge magnets or grout some bath tiles. ***** Spoiler Alert **** Trotsky does get assassinated. It's as banal as that.

Stalin hated Trotsky for many reasons, one among them is that Lenin in his famous testament strongly criticized Stalin as a tough and badly educated leader while recognized Trotsky as the most intelligent politician among the Bolcheviks. In that way Trostky was a kind of impediment for Stalin to seize the whole power in Soviet Union. The party trusted Stalin and the first thing he did was to start a snare campaign against Trotsky among the high bosses of the party as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, who finally supported Stalin in this deed. As a result Trostky was declared a traitor and expelled from USSR, living first at the border of USSR, then in Turkey and finally in Mexico. He continued writing and had an increased number of people following him, a fact enough for Stalin to order his assassination. To this end Stalin and his KGB tools used Mexican communists led by the famous muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. They attempted to kill Trostki once unsuccessfully, then decided to change for another way, i.e. to introduce the agent Jacques Mornard, who in fact was not from Belgium as he claimed to be, but Spanish citizen Ramón Mercader del Río, son of mother born in Cuba. Mornard or Mercader finally killed Trostky, but not his ideas. In fact Stalin made a big mistake because trostkism increased and gained a lot of popularity in several countries after the death of Trostky. The present film is just an effort to show something of this fatal happening, but it is not the best in my opinion. There is no introduction to Trostki, how he was expelled from USSR, why this happened, how he arrived in Mexico. Not knowing the history, it will be very difficult to guess that Stalin was behind this assassination. The relationship of Trostki with some communists, as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, is neither shown at all. The role of Trostky is played well by Richard Burton although he looked fatter than the real Trostky, but Alain Delon as Mornard or Mercader did not play this role convincingly. Mercader was a Stalinist fanatic, and this characteristic is not seen in the role played by Delon. He looked as schizophrenic rather than a man with political convictions.

This is probably not the best picture ever made, even though we have the joy of seeing Richard Burton and hearing him almost twice, thanks to the recordings he makes during this cynical interlude in 20th century history. For the voice of Burton alone, any film should be worth watching. But there is more, much more. Speaking in strange tongues there are also Alain Delon, much more convincing here than in his standard-macho appearances in French Film, and ... Romy Schneider.This wonderful woman and superb actress shows here once more what a gem she really is. Was, unfortunately. What a fantastic performance once again. Why is this not a superb film than ? It is not the difficulty of tongue; all the people on screen are exiles, they have to manage somehow with the words they find and the accents they have. Nor is it the fact that three, no four actors play lovely. Over all the film is just not knitted tight enough, which is a pity, because now it is already worth all of our attention.